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To the Indians who Died in Africa
A man’s destination is his own village,
His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
Playing in the dust together.
Scarred but secure, he has many memories
Which return at the hour of conversation,
(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)
Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,
Foreign to each other.
A man’s destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his.
Let his village remember.
This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story of you:
Of action with a common purpose, action
None the less fruitful if neither you nor we
Know, until the judgement after death,
What is the fruit of action.
Morning at the Window
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves ol fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
Excerpted with permission from TS Eliot: Essential Poetry, Hachette India.
‘Hamlet and his Problems’
Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had a special temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realisation. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr JM Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, observing that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticise it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes – for which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act V. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep …
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degradation …. The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story.
Excerpted with permission from TS Eliot: Selected Poetry and Prose, Hachette India.
‘The Cocktail Party’
Act I. Scene I
[The drawing room of the Chamberlaynes’ London flat. Early evening. Edward Chamberlayne, Julia Shuttlethwaite, Celia Coplestone, Peter Quilpe, Alexander MacColgie Gibbs, and an Unidentified Guest.]
Alex. You’ve missed the point completely, Julia.
There were no tigers. That was the point.
Julia. Then what were you doing, up in a tree?
You and the Maharaja?
Alex. My dear Julia!
It’s perfectly hopeless. You haven’t been listening.
Peter. You’ll have to tell us all over again, Alex.
Alex. I never tell the same story twice.
Julia. But I’m still waiting to know what happened.
I know it started as a story about tigers.
Alex. I said there were no tigers.
Celia. Oh do stop wrangling,
Both of you. It’s your turn, Julia.
Do tell us that story you told the other day, about Lady Klootz and the wedding cake.
Peter. And how the butler found her in the pantry, rinsing her mouth out with champagne.
I like that story.
Celia. I love that story.
Alex. I’m never tired of hearing that story.
Julia. Well, you all seem to know it.
Celia. Do we all know it?
But we’re never tired of hearing you tell it.
I don’t believe everyone here knows it.
[To the Unidentified Guest.]
You don’t know it, do you?
Unidentified Guest. No, I’ve never heard it.
Celia. Here’s one new listener for you, Julia;
And I don’t believe that Edward knows it.
Edward. I may have heard it, but I don’t remember it.
Celia. And Julia’s the only person to tell it.
She’s such a good mimic.
Julia. Am I a good mimic?
Peter. You are a good mimic. You never miss anything.
Alex. She never misses anything unless she wants to.
Celia. Especially the Lithuanian accent.
Peter. I thought she was Belgian.
Alex. Her father belonged to a Baltic family –
One of the oldest Baltic families
With a branch in Sweden and one in Denmark.
There were several very lovely daughters;
I wonder what’s become of them now.
Julia. Lady Klootz was very lovely, once upon a time.
What a life she led! I used to say to her: “Greta!
You have too much vitality.” But she enjoyed herself.
[To the Unidentified Guest.]
Did you know Lady Klootz?
Unidentified Guest. No, I never met her.
Celia. Go on with the story about the wedding cake.
Julia. Well, but it really isn’t my story.
I heard it first from Delia Verinder
Who was there when it happened.
[To the Unidentified Guest.]
Do you know Delia Verinder?
Unidentified Guest. No, I don’t know her.
Julia. Well, one can’t be too careful
Before one tells a story.
Alex. Delia Verinder?
Was she the one who had three brothers?
Julia. How many brothers? Two, I think.
Alex. No, there were three, but you wouldn’t know the third one:
They kept him rather quiet.
Julia. Oh, you mean that one.
Alex. He was feeble-minded.
Julia. Oh, not feeble-minded:
He was only harmless.
Alex. Well then, harmless.
Julia. He was very clever at repairing clocks;
And he had a remarkable sense of hearing –
The only man I ever met who could hear the cry of bats.
Peter. Hear the cry of bats?
Julia. He could hear the cry of bats.
Celia. But how do you know he could hear the cry of bats?
Julia. Because he said so. And I believed him.
Celia. But if he was so… harmless, how could you believe him? He might have imagined it.
Julia. My darling Celia,
You needn’t be so sceptical. I stayed there once
At their castle in the North. How he suffered!
They had to find an island for him
Where there were no bats.
Alex. And is he still there?
Julia is really a mine of information.
Celia. There isn’t much that Julia doesn’t know.
Peter. Go on with the story about the wedding cake.
[Edward leaves the room.]
Julia. No, we’ll wait until Edward comes back into the room.
Now I want to relax. Are there any more cocktails?
Peter. But do go on. Edward wasn’t listening anyway.
Julia. No, he wasn’t listening, but he’s such a strain –
Edward without Lavinia! He’s quite impossible!
Leaving it to me to keep things going.
What a host! And nothing fit to eat!
The only reason for a cocktail party
For a gluttonous old woman like me
Is a really nice titbit. I can drink at home.
[Edward returns with a tray.]
Edward, give me another of those delicious olives.
What’s that? Potato crisps? No, I can’t endure them.
Well, I started to tell you about Lady Klootz.
It was at the Vincewell wedding. Oh, so many years ago!
[To the Unidentified Guest.]
Did you know the Vincewells?
Unidentified Guest. No, I don’t know the Vincewells.
Julia. Oh, they’re both dead now. But I wanted to know.
If they’d been friends of yours, I couldn’t tell the story.
Peter. Were they the parents of Tony Vincewell?
Julia. Yes. Tony was the product, but not the solution.
He only made the situation more difficult.
You know Tony Vincewell? You knew him at Oxford?
Excerpted with permission from TS Eliot: Selected Plays, Hachette India.
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